The next time you’re preparing online video and other marketing materials for your company’s Facebook page, consider how earned and paid media work together. That’s the subject of a new white paper, The Power of Like[1], released by online video measurement company comScore[2]. Exposure to earned and paid media can change consumer purchase behavior.

People that were exposed to Starbucks on Facebook, to give just one example, whether they were fans and friends of fans, were more likely to make offline Starbucks purchases. That’s according to comScore’s media evangelist, Eli Goodman.

Since Facebook accounts for one in every seven minutes spent online, marketers are striving to decipher how far a “Like” can really go when it comes to driving profit.

comScore’s research suggests that brands should focus Facebook marketing campaigns on three dimensions: fan reach (constituting exposure in the newsfeed), engagement (fans directly interacting with brand page), and amplification (content reaching fans and their friends).

In computing the influence of Facebook brand exposure, comScore relies on what it calls the amplification ratio.

“If you have a fan, and through that you have access to the friends of the fan, that ends up being the average amplification,” says Goodman. “It’s as simple as the amplification comes from having fans. That’s really the central theme of how it happens.”

But being popular isn’t enough. Brands also need a mix of paid and earned content to really reach customers.

“It isn’t just as simple as we have fans, because there’s a lot of places that have fans, and lots of fans have friends, and things like that, but it’s coming up with the appropriate marketing mix,” notes Goodman. “We feel, based on what we’re able to see, a combined paid and earned strategy to be able to push the old assets really is what drove the greatest results-oriented latent response.”